Best Magic Card Designs of 2018

Brad: As 2018 comes to a close and we unwrap booster packs for draft, let’s take a moment to review the past year’s Magic: The Gathering cards from a design perspective.

After much deliberation, I decided on a list of Top Five Designed Cards, with one card from each of Rivals of Ixalan, Battlebond, Dominaria, Core Set 2019, Commander 2018 and Guilds of Ravnica. Additionally, every rarity is represented on at least one card in this list.

Adam: This was an interesting exercise. With the sheer number of cards that were released this year, finding the five best was no small task.

If you listen to our podcast, you will understand why I chose this card. I love simple designs, especially those that have been overlooked for decades. This simple French-vanilla bird had never seen print before this year, and I’m happy to see it.

The second reason I love it so much is that I designed the exact same card for my custom set, New Legends. (Yeah, okay, I’ll stop patting myself on the back.)

I’m not a sports guy, but even I understand the flavor of this card. Battlebond was meant to evoke arena combat with strict rules, and this card really gets the point across. Also, it’s great in any cube that has a strong aura/equipment theme.

I also want to piggyback on Brad’s comment above. You can’t have Fumble in a non-sports set, so this is a big flavor hit.

Adam and I swung at our opponents for lethal in a Two-Headed Giant Battlebond Sealed match at Grand Prix Las Vegas …except our opponents didn’t lose. Instead, they tapped four mana, drew a full hand’s worth of cards, then took another turn to defeat us. Suffice to say, we were stunned.

When you’ve been playing the game for twenty-some years and you see a callback to a card from 1994, you tend to get a little excited. Havingthe Blackblade appear on a real card after all this time really made me smile.

The rules text “Equip Legendary Creature” is also one of my favorite things in the game. I had been messing around in that design space, but this iteration is super clean and I can’t say enough nice things about it.

Vorthos players often appreciate top-down card designs. But it can matter a whole lot to see a creature card whose rules text references a piece of that character’s lore. Chromium, the Mutable is such a card.

A great lore reference doesn’t always guarantee great card design, but Chromium has the best of both worlds. This card’s set of abilities work together perfectly to evoke a “basically untouchable” Dragon in gameplay.

Hexproof: a great ability when used sparingly. Competitive Slippery Bogle decks in Modern are a great example of what happens when hexproof goes too far. As a result, recent sets only contain hexproof on creatures with converted mana cost four or more; cheaper creatures only get hexproof under certain conditions. But unlike previous examples, this latest iteration on hexproof isn’t based on a condition or a limited time frame– it’s limited scope!

Borrowing design technology that already exists with “protection from [quality],” Dominaria’s Knight of Grace and Knight of Malice’s “hexproof from [color]” counters hexproof’s inherent power. While this may notwork in every set, it was an elegant solution to the hexproof problem in Dominaria.

What’s more, this mirrored pair evokes the classic cards White Knight and Black Knight. The original pair could ward off black spells and white spells, respectively, but their protection ability meant they could never actually fight each other. “Hexproof from [color]” answers this problem.